


hold me fast, fear me not

by displayheartcode



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Ballad 39: Tam Lin, F/F, Halloween
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:56:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27184858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/displayheartcode/pseuds/displayheartcode
Summary: With Halloween near, an old danger lurks in the shadows.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 7
Kudos: 8





	hold me fast, fear me not

**Author's Note:**

> "Rachel, aren't you working on a full-length novel about queer girls and The Ballad of Tam Lin?" 
> 
> Yes, but in the meantime with revisions and grad school... Here is another rushed fairytale that I wrote during a long commute I had last year.

Jamie hated parties.

She couldn’t understand why she and her girlfriend Tanya were even there, not with their respective theses that needed to be workshopped, not with the various reminders in their inboxes and meetings with professors about senior year of college being their most important. 

But Tanya had seen a poster, reminding Jamie how they had few true college experiences under their belt. “You’ll have time to study Scottish ballads,” she had said, placing a dress out. “But only one last chance for a real college party.” 

This was the nature of their relationship: Tanya wanting to try new things, to live her life in college to the fullest while Jamie was content to stubbornly dig her feet in the ground like a tree. But Tanya had been persuasive, even finding them similar princess dresses to wear.

So here they were, two nights before Halloween, and her stomach too nervous to eat. If this was what Jamie had been missing out on, then the reality was a depressing thing.

It was then Jamie realized she was hearing the tinkling of silver bells at the party. Despite the heat of bodies being packed inside, she shivered.

Jamie moved away from the table heavy with fruit and desserts and looked around to see where the sound was coming from, so unusual with the loud conversations and a pop-rock playlist hissing from the cheap speakers.

“Do you hear…” But her girlfriend wasn’t by her side anymore.

Jamie caught a glimpse of Tanya’s long braid. She reached out, but a group of moving people forced her back to the table, their skin damp with sweat and eyes silver-bright in the room that made Jamie’s blood run cold. 

Tanya was caught in a circle of dancers, the person on her right dressed in white, the other brown and one gray. Their frantic movements were at a rhythm different than what was coming from the speaker system. But it was the look on Tanya’s face that made Jamie freeze. All of those worries about upcoming exams and college graduation creeping closer were gone from her wide smile and bright eyes.

She was ecstatic, her expression matching several of the people in the crowd.

“Tanya!” Jamie shoved a classmate aside. She stumbled over the hem of her dress. But people pressed close on either side, the heat and sounds becoming almost too much. The bells were ringing in her ears, separate from everything else. Jamie called out again, nearly screaming as the music grew loud enough to make her teeth hurt. There was a ripple among the partygoers, the scent of crushed flowers, and human sweat. Costumes melting into elaborate designs of leaves and roses, pale faces gaining ram’s horns that curled on either side of their temples, gauzy wings spilling from their backs, ears as sharp as knives…. Bright green tree limbs dripped from the walls the ground turning to moss and stone under her feet, the music now as sour as lime juice with violins and fiddles…

 _I’m dreaming,_ Jamie tried to think as she stumbled backward. Fear rooted in her mind as she saw a dancer with a blood-smeared mouth, holding a half-eaten golden apple in their hand.

This was a poem brought to life. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be happening.

Terrified, Jamie found the door.

The night air was cool against her skin and tears were already falling from her face. She turned around, the music already faint, and saw that the door to the fraternity was closed shut. A lone figure stood at the wrap-around porch. He caught Jamie’s frightened gaze and mouthed the words slowly, mockingly, _run as fast as you can._

Above her, the moon was full like a blister about to pop.

#

Jamie hadn’t been sure, but on the next night, she braved the threshold with salt and iron in her pocket and a fire in her heart. The party had already spilled to the front lawn of the fraternity, people dancing and music causing the walls to vibrate, but she knew the rules from the old stories. She had been in the land Under the Hill and it had taken her girlfriend.

The same creature, the fairy, from the other night opened the door. Unlike everyone else in their transformed Halloween costumes, he was dressed in the usual campus attire of a maroon hoodie and washed out pair of jeans. Something glimmered at the edges of his face as if the party lights had trouble reaching his sharp features.

“Mortal girl,” he greeted.

Jamie looked at him in the eye. She said, “Bring her back to me.”

“If you can reach the dancers and if she leaves willingly with you, then you may have her again. This is your second try.” His smile was wide as he stepped back.

Jamie entered the room and her senses exploded around her. Lights became more vivid, the sounds were strange with bird calls and the scent of something wet and green permeating the air. Jamie stumbled, thrown off at how different this was from last night.

But now she knew what to expect with Fairy and she was prepared for this.

She dug her fingers in her coat pocket, letting the cold iron nail she had swiped from her roommates’ art project to prick her skin. If her research was right, hell, if _Wikipedia_ was right… But the world shifted and stopped spinning. Fairy began to move over her skin like water, and she could start her way through the dense crowd of ensorcelled humans and cunning monsters.

Then there was Tanya. She was in a throng of dancers. Her copper-brown hair now twisted in an elaborate braid, her cheesy Disney gown replaced by a creation made from green silk that swirled around her ankles and reminded Jamie of summer grass.

She elbowed her way through, salt spilling from her pocket as she struggled to make her way. There was a Tanya by the punch bowl with cat-like eyes. A Tanya drifting by the door, her long hair like damp seaweed around her shoulders. Copies of her girlfriend laughing with classmates, eating, and dancing. All dressed in the same green gown with matching sly smiles

One grabbed her by the hair, the other tore her pockets and emptied the contents of salt and berries and iron to the floor. One pressed her mouth to Jamie’s ear, speaking in Tanya’s voice but an octave too high. “At the end of seven years, we pay a tithe to hell.”

Jamie froze and the creature holding her hair added, “Can’t you see your little girlfriend is better off with us? At least here her life will mean something.”

Job applications. Thesis papers. Final projects and exams. An entire life of monotony and stress expanded in Jamie’s mind, budgets and bills, Tanya drifting away from her, student loans piling as boredom numbed her soul, their relationship withering like a dying flower., becoming strangers to each other as they aged, and memories forgotten. But _here_ in Fairy, Tanya could be a single shining moment, her life a catalyst—

_“No!”_

They shoved her out of the house, watching her fall beyond the door and on the porch.

And the door closed in front of her.

#

It was Halloween night. This was her last try. Jamie felt wild desperation eat away at her heart. She had walked the campus in a daze the whole morning and afternoon, muttering the warning the fairies had given her the previous night. _At the end of seven years, we pay a tithe to hell._ Jamie kicked the door open. _And I am full and fair of flesh, and I fear it is myself._

“Tanya!” she cried out. Stories full of yearning poets and brave maidens and clever priests filled her head. Her girlfriend’s white dress stood bright against the other outfits in the room. It looked as though it was woven from starlight. Earrings glittered by her ears, white roses in her hair, dark circles under her bright gray eyes. She looked as beautiful and distant as a fading star.

She looked like a sacrifice.

Tara stood in the center of a circle of dancers moving around her. The music from the previous nights had changed into something faster, the rhythm strong enough to make Jamie’s heart beat along with it.

“If it isn’t our brave hero,” the fairy welcomed her. No longer hiding under a mortal disguise, he stood before her in a black doublet stitched with silver trees, a matching cape around his shoulders. “Care to join us at last? It is the mirk and midnight hour.”

He held a hand to Jamie for her to accept. His nails were long, the tips curled and yellowed.

The land of Under the Hill fully surrounded them. Ancient trees towered from the mossy ground at her feet, metallic songbirds filtered from limb to limb, their cries like lost human voices. The air was thick with the scent of blood and roses, and Jamie saw scenes that she had only read about in ballads, a procession of riders wearing gold-hammered crowns waiting for the rite to start, redcaps with freshly-stained hats with blood dripping down the sides of their faces, light-footed elves with flowers in their hair. This was a place of endless possibilities and enchantments, where she would never have to worry about life after college, where Jamie could be young and happy forever and knowing nothing beyond the revel.

 _Stay, stay_ , the magic was telling her. _You can finally be happy._

Jamie reached to take his hand and dragged the iron nail she’d been hiding between her fingers across his palm, the surrounding skin blistering and burning as he shrieked in inhuman pain. Jamie ran with her human heart stubborn for survival.

She shoved another advancing fairy, this one in a brown robe, and forced her way to the circle, her thoughts cycling wildly as she saw Tanya dancing in the center. She was still human, she wasn’t a corpse for immortal monsters to feast on, nor had she been transformed into a snake or alder.

Without hesitation, without explanation, Jamie reached for her hand and _pulled_ Tanya out of the circle.

This was Fairy and she now knew the rules.

“I know you’re scared, but hold me tight, fear me not,” Jamie told her. She had no milk-white steed nor a green mantle to help her, but she had this. “I am your one true love.” And she kissed her, brief and all-encompassing like a lightning strike.

Tanya’s mouth was sticky with wine. There was a moment when Jamie wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be enough if her love for Tanya wasn’t strong enough to break this spell. But Tanya’s dark eyes were wide, and she squeezed Jamie’s hand in recognition, and they turned to the door.

With their hands bound together and fairytale threatening to trap them, Jamie ran with the words of the ballad on her tongue, Tanya’s hand in hers as lights, colors, and sound rushed by them in a terrifying blur. The party was changing around them as they fought against the magic of Under the Hill.

Magic ran over them like water, Jamie’s words shielding them like a prayer. There would be no transformations tonight, no tithe, no innocent bloodshed Under the Hill. She chanted the poem, about Janet meeting young Tam Lin and pulling the rose, of the Fairy Ride on Halloween with a moon much like this one in the night sky. It meant there was a chance.

She didn’t look back. Even as elves jeered and goblin revealed their sharp teeth, she knew to keep running. The scent of blood and roses threatened to overwhelm her, but she kept chanting the lines. “ _And then I'll be your own true-love, I'll turn into a naked knight, then cover me with your green mantle, and hide me out of sight—"_

Jamie rammed her shoulder against the battered wooden door and threw themselves out and down the porch steps, stumbling to the cold ground.

“And you’ll bring me home,” Tanya finished, speaking for the first time, her voice hoarse.

Tanya’s death shroud had melted back into her original costume. The hem dirtied and various stains on the cheap pink fabric, her hair tangled around her face like thorns. She threw herself into Jamie’s arms and that was all Jamie could ever hope for.

With their hands fastened tight, they knew better than to let go.


End file.
